David Fincher is bringing your favorite Swedish hacker girl Lisbeth Salander to life in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — but he almost tackled Spider-Man instead. In our exclusive interview, the director told us how he would have handled the web-slinger... and walked us through his operatic title sequence in great detail.

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Fincher has been on the Spider-Man short list for some time. In 1999 Fincher passed on the opportunity to film Spider-Man. And last January he was one of the names tossed around to reboot the Spider-Man movies, before Marc Webb took the job. Sadly he never took the gig — but here's what he told us about his plans:

My impression what Spider-Man could be is very different from what Sam [Raimi] did or what Sam wanted to do. I think the reason he directed that movie was because he wanted to do the Marvel comic superhero. I was never interested in the genesis story. I couldn't get past a guy getting bit by a red and blue spider. It was just a problem… It was not something that I felt I could do straight-faced. I wanted to start with Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin, and I wanted to kill Gwen Stacy.

The title sequence of the movie that I was going to do was going to be a ten minute — basically a music video, an opera, which was going to be the one shot that took you through the entire Peter Parker [backstory]. Bit by a radio active spider, the death of Uncle Ben, the loss of Mary Jane, and [then the movie] was going to begin with Peter meeting Gwen Stacy. It was a very different thing, it wasn't the teenager story. It was much more of the guy who's settled into being a freak.

We've got plenty more of our Fincher interview, talking about Dragon Tattoo, later this week. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo opens in theaters on Tuesday, December 20th.